BOOKS OF THE TIMES; An Insider's Troubling Account of the U.S. Role in Iraq

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: June 17, 2005

Squandered Victory
The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq
By Larry Diamond
369 pages. Times Books/Henry Holt & Company. $25.

The failures of the Bush administration to prepare adequately for the postwar period in Iraq are by now well known, underscored by the revelation this week that a briefing paper, prepared for Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain eight months before the invasion, warned that ''a postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise'' and that ''little thought'' had been given by the United States to ''the aftermath and how to shape it.''It is a subject explicated in chilling -- and often scathing -- detail by ''Squandered Victory,'' a new book by Larry Diamond, a former senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and a leading American scholar on democracy and democratic movements. In this book, Mr. Diamond contends that the postwar troubles in Iraq -- a bloody and unrelenting insurgency, the creation of a new breeding ground for terrorists and metastasizing ethnic and religious tensions -- are the result of ''gross negligence'' on the part of a Bush administration that rushed to war. He asserts that ''mistakes were made at virtually every turn'' of the occupation, and that ''every mistake the United States made in Iraq narrowed the scope and lengthened the odds for progress.''

His book not only provides an unsettling account of the mind-boggling challenges involved in trying to bring democracy to Iraq (ranging from practical matters like setting up an infrastructure for the electoral process to political and philosophical issues dealing with the drafting of a constitution) but also lays out a thoughtful, pull-no-punches analysis of the missteps and misjudgments by the Bush White House and the Pentagon in the months before and after America's toppling of Saddam Hussein.

It is a book that should be read by anyone interested in understanding why the United States' quick military victory has given way to an increasingly virulent insurgency and nearly daily reports of car bombings and suicide attacks, why even post-election hopes have been shadowed by worries about the continuing violence spiraling into a Lebanon-style civil war.

Certainly many of Mr. Diamond's points have been made before: by reporters, by critics of the administration's foreign policy, and in recent months by several studies of United States military operations in Iraq -- including a Rand Corporation study that took the Pentagon to task for failing to adequately address stabilization and reconstruction issues, and a study by Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, the former chief war planner for the 101st Airborne Division stationed in northern Iraq, who concluded that ''there was no adequate operational plan for stability operations and support operations'' in Iraq after the combat phase.What makes Mr. Diamond's account particularly valuable is its insider's look at the day-to-day realities on the ground in Iraq in 2004 (which often stood in stark contrast to the spin emanating from Washington) and his ability to provide a historical context for the efforts to implant democracy in Iraq.

Mr. Diamond had not been a supporter of the war, but in the fall of 2003, he says, he received a call from his longtime friend and former Stanford University colleague Condoleezza Rice asking him to spend several months in Iraq as an adviser to American occupation authorities. Because he believed that if the United States failed there ''Iraq would become what it had not been before the war: a haven for international terrorism and possibly a direct threat to America's national security'', he agreed to go. He was also excited, he says, by the challenge of helping ''to build a decent, lawful, and democratic political order'' in Iraq.

As he began his work, however, Mr. Diamond became convinced that America's ''plan for political transition in Iraq was critically flawed,'' that there was a fundamental contradiction between ''our aspiration for democracy'' and ''our impulse for unilateral control.'' He writes that the Americans ''never listened carefully to the Iraqi people, or to the figures in the country that they respected'' -- like the Shiite leader the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani -- and that ''we never won their trust and confidence.''

As Mr. Diamond sees it, ''blame for the early blunders'' in Iraq ''lies with the high officials of the Bush administration -- including the president himself -- who decided to go to war when we did, in the way we did, with the lack of preparation that has become brutally apparent.'' He reminds us that ''the startling mismanagement of planning for the postwar did not result from a sudden emergency and a lack of time to plan'': civilians at the Pentagon had begun pushing the case for war against Iraq almost immediately after 9/11, and a wide-ranging report known at the Future of Iraq Project had been started at the State Department in the spring of 2002. This report, says Mr. Diamond, was initially ignored by the Pentagon, which in its early certitude about ''the inevitability and speed of America's triumph,'' swept ''aside experts in the State Department and elsewhere who had described what the postwar realities in Iraq would require.''